06th Mar 2004
Corporate Cliches Give Way To Not So Mainstream
[in which it's evident that I'm out of practice writing ... need to
write my practice .. haven't writt... oh farken mother of Abraham
Lincoln already!]
So I’m not totally corporate. Never have been. As I sat down
tonight to write for a change, I thought of the conflicts between what
we do in a day that is so mainstream, versus what we can appreciate
that is decidedly not:
“I’ll take my PowerBook (Unix-loving rebel) to Starbucks (McDonalds of
gourmet coffee) to get a Mocha (just mainline me already) and write
while connected to a T-Mobile hotspot (WiFi loving nut, deciding that
$20/month is worth it, despite what I posted last year)” Oh, and I
work for AOL, because some companies I have to go back to once or
twice (Broderbund, Island Graphics, and AOL). I headed off in my New
Balance shod piggies.
The Starbucks of New York can only be separated with highly sophisticated GPS
equipment. Some are wall to wall laptop screens.
I could go on about all of the corporate influences throughout the day.
Sometimes I’m really conscious of it, and others I’m a blissful CostCo
sheep. We all have our reasons, right?
So a few not so mainstream things:
- I went to see The Barbarian Invasions again. I had seen it during the New York Film
Festival, and highly recommend it. It’s at turns funny, touching, and
heart-wrenching. How many films use heroin to good effect? French
with subtitles (there, we just lost 80% of the population - which, in
a way, is one of the points of the film). Check out “The Dreamers” and “City of God” while you’re at it. - Jason Kottke’s mention of The Grey Album, by DJ Dangermouse. You should understand that I don’t appreciate most Rap. The Grey Album is a brilliant fusion of The Beatles “White Album” and Jay-Z’s “Black Album”. An old favorite from my childhood mixed with someone who has some obvious intelligence and talent. The floodgates are opening.
The ’00’s are going to shape up to be a decade of found audio art.
The Remix Cuisinarts (oh oh, a corporate reference…) are joining
forces with BitTorrent, and the bits are flying out to the iPodden
(another…) everywhere. Fuck radio. The real innovation is
happening in little studios on Macs, piped out to the Net 24/7. - I’m winding my way through Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, having made it to the era of The New York Dolls. I have to restrain myself from skipping ahead to the bits about The Ramones.
There’s probably some concluding point to all of this. Here is one:
In America, or at least in New York, you would be hard-pressed to get
through a day without being bombarded with Corporate messages of all
kinds. Billboards pulsate. Radios blare. Messages scroll. So take
some time every day to turn your back to it, and relish that.
